Existential and nostalgic motives in the poetry of Ostap Tarnavsky (the concept of “foreignness”)

Abstract

The article considers existential and nostalgic motives in the poems of Ostap Tarnavsky of the period of emigration. The aim of the article is to analyze the concept of “foreignness”, which is part of the macro concept of “fate” and the leitmotif of numerous poems by the artist, written in exile. The poet’s existential and nostalgic lyrics, which combine the dramatic feelings of an emigrant exile and the existential understanding of his own destiny as a tragedy of the Ukrainian’s existence without Ukraine, are embodied in the pervasive opposition of a foreign land. As in many other emigrant poets, O. Tarnavsky’s poetry is pervasive in the image of a traveler – a “traveler” who wanders other people’s roads in search of the home. The existentialism of this dramatic image is that only the lyrical hero’s homeland can be a real home, but he moves away from year to year, remaining unattainable, and every day an unrealizable dream about him more like an illusion, creating fatigue in the lyrical hero’s soul, waves of loneliness, despair, and hopelessness, leaving in the heart only memories, tragic experiences of the past days, and lost hopes. It is studied that the concept of “foreignness” is realized in the lyrics of O. Tarnavsky through numerous semantic fields: travel, “exodus”, roads, pier, shelter, which together form a picture of emigration in the artistic and poetic world of the artist, who seeks refuge in foreign lands, looking back from time to time, where his native land recedes and disappears beyond the horizon, remaining in nostalgic memories and creating existential hopelessness of realizing the impossibility of returning home. In his lyrics, the artist comprehends the “exodus” of the Ukrainian people (and himself personally) from his native land from a historiosophical point of view and existential-philosophical awareness of the fate of the exiled emigrant in the era of historical cataclysms of the twentieth century.